tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post2093482145390560791..comments2013-10-25T23:22:53.538-04:00Comments on L'Hôte: why do they pay bloggers, anyhow?Freddiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749983229420234896noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-83023885477564759402012-04-08T20:58:20.085-04:002012-04-08T20:58:20.085-04:00It&#39;s good that they do this actually. Because ...It&#39;s good that they do this actually. Because they have given stagnant bloggers the chance to improve their career and talent. Having this kind of passion would benefit. There are many writers today who are actually thankful of it.Charlotte Dayhttp://www.postsgenius.com/advertiser/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-28437020038312891362011-09-28T09:20:32.212-04:002011-09-28T09:20:32.212-04:00I don&#39;t know what else would explain the fact ...<i>I don&#39;t know what else would explain the fact that most college courses are taught by adjuncts.</i><br /><br />They&#39;re not.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-18401145462149637642011-09-23T11:57:27.176-04:002011-09-23T11:57:27.176-04:00Just because Yglesias is making a dumb argument do...Just because Yglesias is making a dumb argument doesn&#39;t mean that higher education isn&#39;t off the rails. If you proposed to a department chair that he or she is in the business of information dissemination, you&#39;d probably find agreement. I don&#39;t know what else would explain the fact that most college courses are taught by adjuncts.<br /><br />I suspect you&#39;re at a dandy R1 institution and aren&#39;t privy in first-hand fashion to what goes on down the ladder. It&#39;s ugly, though. The beast has been starved. Yglesias is just doing the neo-lib part of ushering the thing people like him ruined into oblivion.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-12938734588931055222011-09-22T14:35:52.182-04:002011-09-22T14:35:52.182-04:00The primary purpose of the university isn&#39;t in...The primary purpose of the university isn&#39;t information delivery, though. It&#39;s credentializing. Ask a hundred college students why they&#39;re getting a diploma, and most will say it&#39;s because they want a good job, and that requires a college degree. Certainly, there are students who are getting a college degree because they want to learn. But there are many ways to learn, and most don&#39;t involve spending five figures.<br /><br /> As tuitions continue to increase, and wages stay flat, there&#39;s going to be a breaking point where the gains of a university diploma are less than the cost of tuition. And at that point, other forms of credentializing will become more common, and the university will be forced into a dramatic re-evaluation of its costs.That Fuzzy Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09586029006083399346noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-72852510074654829752011-09-19T14:44:32.950-04:002011-09-19T14:44:32.950-04:00I don&#39;t think it&#39;s unnecessarily harsh. No...I don&#39;t think it&#39;s unnecessarily harsh. Nobody forces any blogger to post &quot;dozens of articles&quot; per day. In fact, most reasonable people would think that attempting to make that many policy proposals on such a wide array of issues on a daily basis all but ensures frequent lapses of judgement and sanity.Ranjit Sureshhttp://ranjitsuresh.blogspot.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-74867047693278225182011-09-18T02:15:21.020-04:002011-09-18T02:15:21.020-04:00I think you&#39;re being unnecessarily harsh here....I think you&#39;re being unnecessarily harsh here. Yglesias authors dozens of posts on a whole slew of topics every day. Anyone who writes that much and that broadly will inevitably produce a spectrum of quality. Some posts will be better than others. It&#39;s a bit much to claim that Matt doesn&#39;t &quot;recognize the value of empirical data.&quot; More likely, he quickly wrote this in 10 minutes and didn&#39;t think about it too much.<br /><br />Readers bear some of the responsibility here too. As blog readers, we should understand the medium before we engage in it. Don&#39;t read blogs if you want in-depth research. Read the in-depth research.<br />Prajprajwalkhttp://prajwalk.wordpress.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-77430437978495117542011-09-16T15:46:25.279-04:002011-09-16T15:46:25.279-04:00Ygelsias isn&#39;t trying to describe reality. He ...Ygelsias isn&#39;t trying to describe reality. He and those like him are tying to make the misery of a neoliberalized future seem like a &quot;natural&quot; development over which we have no control.<br /><br />Plus, he&#39;s a silly little man with a sharply limited set of facts.Tom Bachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14533490170256488172noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-24776366666689309732011-09-16T10:16:49.913-04:002011-09-16T10:16:49.913-04:00Neo-liberals specialize in making up arguments and...Neo-liberals specialize in making up arguments and pulling stuff out of their own asses in order to justify undermining public institutions. It&#39;s what they do, it&#39;s what Matt does. Other than for small-p political or civility reasons, I don&#39;t know why you make your periodic gestures of respect and obeisance to him, because he isn&#39;t worth it. I get why Ezra Klein does this shit (careerism now that he&#39;s in the MSM), so that&#39;s somewhat understandable if not laudable, but Matt actually believes this no-evidence crap as a matter of genuine conviction (the market can magically change an institution that has evolved over a thousand years into an efficient knowledge delivery mechanism!). Even the language he uses is mechanical, reductive, eliminative, detached from and uninterested in the reality of how real humans can talk to each other, communicate information, and evaluate in a hands-on way how well they&#39;ve learned it. It&#39;s a rhetoric empty of humanity and perfectly reflects the ideology behind it, while promising an analytical rigor without any real foundation. Dude, the emperor has no clothes!redscotthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00311167473555575509noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-25696006655478366242011-09-16T08:42:18.371-04:002011-09-16T08:42:18.371-04:00You&#39;re a wise man Alex.You&#39;re a wise man Alex.Freddiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749983229420234896noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-75649036257039434452011-09-16T08:37:32.419-04:002011-09-16T08:37:32.419-04:00Lectures are not education. A trove of research de...Lectures are not education. A trove of research demonstrates that lectures are an inefficient way to disseminate information. And lecturing is always the easy part. The hard part is assessing whether students have absorbed the <br /><br />Also: tuitions have been going up for years. People are not deserting the university. Precisely the opposite. This is because, again-- to call the point of the university &quot;knowledge delivery&quot; is just absurd.Freddiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749983229420234896noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-85107004008691145412011-09-16T08:31:07.590-04:002011-09-16T08:31:07.590-04:00As long as there are hot young co-eds, there will ...As long as there are hot young co-eds, there will be young men signing up for college. Information delivery wasn&#39;t the only thing college provided for me!Alex Wallerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00666928518895858365noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-70079658716940446272011-09-16T01:02:36.322-04:002011-09-16T01:02:36.322-04:00Yglesias is predicting, as I understand it, that i...Yglesias is predicting, as I understand it, that in the future some combination of these things will happen:<br /><br />--university tuition will be lower<br />--there will be fewer students at traditional high-priced universities<br />--there will be fewer and/or lower-paid professors teaching those students<br /><br />If he&#39;s right, then in 20 years he&#39;ll be able to point to hard data about declining enrollments, declining tuition, or skyrocketing use of Stanford&#39;s Engineering Everywhere and its successors.<br /><br />But I don&#39;t see why he can&#39;t make the argument before the process he&#39;s predicting begins in earnest. His evidence is both specific (top universities putting new, free education-for-all programs on the internet) and general (if tuition goes up while it gets easier to learn by other means, future teenagers will have different incentives than today&#39;s).<br /><br />As for the claim that universities put free lectures on the internet because they know it isn&#39;t a threat, perhaps some actors within universities feel that way, but they could be wrong. I expect many of the professors who give the lectures believe in radically greater access to education for its own sake.Erik M.noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5902617359729115650.post-82656683097677103202011-09-16T00:47:55.712-04:002011-09-16T00:47:55.712-04:00While I agree with Yglesias&#39; conclusion that u...While I agree with Yglesias&#39; conclusion that universities are imperiled, I&#39;d lean towards this fictitious explanation from JM Coetzee:<br /><br />&quot;It was always a bit of a lie that universities were self-governing institutions. Nevertheless, what universities suffered during the 1980s and 1990s was pretty shameful, as under threat of having their funding cut they allowed themselves to be turned into business enterprises, in which professors who had previously carried on their enquiries in sovereign freedom were transformed into harried employees required to fulfill quotas under the scrutiny of professional managers. Whether the old powers of the professoriate will ever be restored is much to be doubted.&quot;<br /><br />&quot;In the days when Poland was under the Communist rule, there were dissidents who conducted night classes in their homes, running seminars on writers and philosophers excluded from the official canon (for example, Plato). No money changed hands, though there may have been other forms of payment. If the spirit of the university is to survive, something along those lines may have to come into being in countries where tertiary education has been wholly subordinated to business principles. In other words, the real university may have to move into people’s homes and grant degrees for which the sole backing will be the names of the scholars who sign the certificates.&quot; (Diary of a Bad Year, pgs. 31-2)jcapannoreply@blogger.com